Cardinal warns British govt over gay adoptions

Published: 22 January 2007

The British Church's adoption services may be forced to close down if new gay rights laws required Catholic agencies to provide services that contradict Church teaching, Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor told the British Government.

Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor also said that granting adoptions to gays would conflict with Catholic belief, the International Herald Tribune reports.

"We believe it would be unreasonable, unnecessary and unjust discrimination against Catholics for the government to insist that if they wish to continue to work with local authorities, Catholic adoption agencies must act against the teaching of the church and their own consciences by being obliged in law to provide such a service," the Cardinal said in a letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair, which was released on Tuesday.

But the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, said the government was unlikely to bow to the church's protest although he did not wish to see the Catholic agencies close.

"But if we take the view as a society that we should not discriminate against people who are homosexual, you cannot give exclusions to people on the grounds that their religion or their race says 'we don't agree with that,'" Falconer said in an interview with BBC Radio.